About NHS Dentist
Dental IT was asked to look at a large, ten-surgery practice suffering with persistently poor performance and reliability issues, problems with backup and data loss, and additional service issues. After previously working with two other major suppliers, the practice had been left at a loss with their IT systems and was in need of support.
IT requirements
The network required a detailed audit, which highlighted a number of major flaws:
- The network infrastructure was lacking, having evolved over the years with many added switches and extensions.
- Multiple servers had been installed with non-standard clustering configurations using amateur build generic servers, extremely low grade switches and iSCSI NAS devices with poor I/O capabilities.
- The backup system was simply not working at all.
Integrated solutions
The size and scale of the practice determined a complete rebuild of the core network in order to ensure always-on IT systems. A total rewire of the practice was carried out alongside the current network, introducing a highly specified and well-built HP ProLiant rack-mounted server, UPS backed, with SAS disks and hardware RAID, a high end caching controller and plenty of RAM.
Imaging backup was put in place alongside a secondary file backup. After upgrading the Internet connectivity, we introduced a high end HP managed switch and carried out migration works over a weekend to prevent downtime. The practice has some of the largest clinical databases in the country, which were all migrated without issue. All services were successfully running when the practice went live with the new systems.
